We have a long-standing tradition of apple-picking for my birthday. This year, for the first time since we started doing this, it rained. We got a little wet, a little muddy, and a lot of incredible apples.
The Science Fiction Book Club tells us that the R. L. Fanthorpe Write-Alike Contest is now open. I had never heard of Fanthorpe, or even any of his many pseudonyms; apparently he wrote at least 180 novels, including 89 in a three-year period.
Given the fame of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, the existence of a Write-Alike contest might give one the impression that Fanthorpe might be a memorably poor writer, but to draw such an impression on such scant evidence would be unjust; after all, there are or were, apparently, a Faux Faulkner Contest and a Bad Hemingway Contest, at the very least. Wait, instead, to make your determination until sampling some of his thesaurian prose - to think, he wrote these without any revision whatsoever!
Peltorro.com is the repository of all that is Fanthorpian.
“Everywhere was dark, dark darkness. Blackness. Black. Black blackness.”
A 1,000 Years On
Writing as John E. Muller
“He stood trembling like a bladder of lard…”
The Thing From Sheol
Writing as Bron Fane
“Chuck Mahoney was running, running wildly and blindly around the ancient Temple, tripping, stumbling, falling, scrambling to his feet again and falling once more. He was bruised, battered, breathless and bloodstained.”
The Last Valkyrie
Writing as Lionel Roberts
Apex Digest is an excellent sf/horror magazine, and it needs some help. You can buy raffle tickets here, or just subscribe. I subscribed, and I may buy some raffle tickets, too.
Ruby on Rails folks may notice that the Apex store site is running on Shopify, Tobias Luettke’s Rails-based e-commerce host. How cool is that?
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1064#comments
But then you have to pay TEN FRICKIN’ DOLLARS for every vote you change. I mean, it’s outrageous!
I think it’s been ten years since the last time I said that.
The more I’m loving revision.
This too shall pass, my son.
I switched one chapter from Ven’s point of view to Tita’s, and I love the way it works now. A bunch of stuff is better-explained than before. The only downside is that I had to give up on the closing image of the chapter, but, on balance, that may be good as well; the new chapter close seems to have a lot more movement in it, despite conveying the same events in the same order. The magic of POV..
Or small section thereof.
Wordpress is going to make me learn some PHP, I can just feel it.
is a word I just made up to describe the process of removing from a fantasy novel a chapter about attacking and disabling a funicular (Wikipedia definition; many cool pictures, including the one below at the right). In other words, a process I just went through.
I’d really been looking forward to the funicular sabotage chapter. Great opportunity to forward the revolution, develop the relationship between two of the primary characters, cool magic-engineering tech. And there’s no reason you can’t have a funicular in a Renaissance-era story with metallurgical magic. Take a look at page 31 of Philip Ball’s wonderful biography of Paracelsus, The Devil’s Doctor (click on the link that’s on page 31). There are some marvelous woodcuts of huge, intricate mining machinery from the fifteenth century, built and used entirely without the aid of metallurgical magic! The main obstacle to creating a really useful heavy-cargo funicular using Renaissance engineering would have to be the rails; slap on a little metallurgical magic and off you go!
But, darn it all, the contrast was just too great. The book already flows well without the chapter I wanted to add; the funicular attack was just so dramatic, it deserved to be the climax of the book, not a relationship-building exercise that gets tossed aside as soon as it’s done.
Hey, Tita, you want to go blow up the funicular?
Ven, you romantic dog! Just let me grab my purse!
So I completed the defuniculation last night. Started the evening at 76K words, with the prospect of 80K before me; now I’m down to 73K, probably ending at 78K. I’ve started to move some of the less funicular-specific good stuff into other chapters. The great thing about novel-writing is how much good stuff can just spring into existence while you’re working out other things. I probably did as much prep work for this chapter as I had done for all of the rest of the book combined. I drew maps of the city to figure out where the funicular would go; I designed the workings of the funicular, invented magical terminology for metalworking, and plotted not one, but two strategies for attacking the funicular (as well as a counterattack that derailed (as it were) the first attack. And, for all that planning and outlining, what I loved about most about the chapter were the following lines:
“May I also introduce Tita Panteknika, an accomplished [air wizard] who will be assisting us today.”
Cirapo snorted. “An [air wizard]? I did not know we were planning to murder anyone today. I would have worn different clothes.”
If you had any idea how much those two lines did to support later events, ah, well, you might like them as much as I do. And there’s no way I had known they would crop up until I wrote them.
So I thought that I would lay down a couple of Writing Laws that I’ve learned to date.
First Law: The writer makes the rules.
Corollary: The writer doesn’t break the rules; the writer changes the rules.
In other words, I don’t have to have a funicular if I don’t want one. The only person who thought that a funicular would look good running along the southern border of Heathness was me. I think that there’s another law lurking in this experience, though:
Second Law: No good novel was ever improved by the late addition of a funicular.
In other words, a funicular is too cool a thing to be a seasoning on the dish; it’s got to be the meat. So, someday, you may see Knave of the Funicular from me, if everything works out. Knave of Yes, though, will have to do without one.
Well, not too, too, novel, since I tried it after reading Justine Larbalestier’s fascinating post on her use of spreadsheets to track important metrics of her ongoing writing process.
Now that I’ve gotten to the end of Knave of Yes (my first novel), and halfway through it again in a second pass, I went through the same exercise:
It was very interesting. I learned a couple of things:
I don’t think anything I learned was terribly surprising, but I think that this kind of breakdown can only help.
I have a number of clear memories of this day five years ago:
It goes back that far - the manipulation of 9/11 by Republicans with their willing accomplices in the media. It’s going on this week on ABC, whose miniseries invents counterfactual scenes in which Sandy Berger and Madeleine Albright take deliberate actions to allow bin Laden to survive - didn’t happen, folks. Same miniseries DOES in fact omit that Bush received a memo titled ‘Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside United States” while on vacation - and blew it off with the statement “OK, you’ve covered your ass, now.” And that it was in fact the Bush adminstration that more or less allowed bin Laden to escape from his mountain base in Tora Bora, and that continues to prop up the one government that continues to support him - Pakistan, of course.
Meanwhile, many of the same lawmakers who insisted that perjury in a civil case amply met the Constitution prescription of “high crimes and misdemeanors” now strives mightily to paper over the Bush presidency’s open, admitted, and grotesque violations of the very civil liberties we hold most dear, to grant retroactive legality to invasions of privacy, imprisonment without charges, and torture. These same leaders now plan another war of conquest, in Iran, having failed any conceivable standard for success to pacify a much weaker, tactically vulnerable, impoverished nation.
My people! What has become of you?
